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Rather than give blow-by-blow summaries of some of the excellent sessions I've attended thus far, I thought I'd give a brief roundup and I'll dig in deeper on some of these topics after the conference. (I'll say again, if you're a CF developer you NEED to make plans to be here next year!)

Verity for Fast Text Searching: Ray Camden Members of my CFUG will know from my recent presentation and my inability to shut up about it that I'm a huge (and relatively recently converted) fan of Verity, particularly with all the slick new features in CFMX 7, which was an upgrade from Verity 2.6.2 to Verity 5.5. Ray Camden gave a great talk on not only the new features of Verity, but why you would want to use it, even for database content. Verity can go a long, long way towards making your searching better and faster for your users, and can GREATLY simplify your development efforts in the search arena as well. If you deal with searching at all you owe it to yoursel…

Hello to all from CFUnited! As many other bloggers have done and will do, I'll provide some wrap-ups and summaries for those of you who aren't here (shame on you) as well as more details thoughts and discussions after I get back. That way I'll have time to process the information and provide more than simply a high-level overview, particularly with some of the more thought-provoking sessions that have yet to come.Wednesday Morning KeynoteBen Forta and Tim Buntel from Macromedia shared how well CF is doing (and to paraphrase Ben yet again, anyone who says CF isn't doing well doesn't know what they're talking about) as well as some limited information (limited as in Tim was reading from a script approved by legal :-)) about where CF is going. All CFers will be happy to know that CF 8 is already in the planning stages.The first big news is that there is a CFMX 7 updater called "Merrimack" due shortly (no details on exactly when other than &…

IM gateway + administrator API = very cool stuff. Check out my IM gateway tutorial on macromedia.com and learn how you can create datasources on your CF server via IM! No foolin'!http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/imgateway.htmlAnd greetings from CFUnited, by the way. Had dinner at a great vegetarian restaurant that's literally right next to the hotel tonight, tomorrow is the CFUG manager meeting, and then Wednesday the real insanity starts. I'll probably blog lots after I get back.CommentsMatt - Great tutorial! I have played with the IM Gateways in CFMX7, but th eonly idea I came up with was a 'Magic 8-Ball'-like application, and a basic phonebook that I use at home. I type in a name and I get a list of people that match the name.Posted by Scott Stroz @ 4/17/07 3:04 PM

... with apologies to Paul McCartney. Another relevant tidbit that comes to mind is the great scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (which also inspired a nice beer called "Holy Grale Porter" by the way) in which the Dead Collector is gathering up dead bodies, one of which has something to say about it. (Scroll down about half way or do a find for "the dead body that claims it isn't").Anyhow, to get back on track here, Doug Hughes has a nice checklist and discussion concerning whether or not Mach-II is actually dead. I'm totally with Doug on this one as you may have gathered from my previous post about this.Furthermore, even as those declaring Mach-II to be dead have pointed out, there's nothing prohibiting someone from picking up Mach-II and running with it; apparently the only prohbition in the Mach-II license is that you can't use the name. If there's a group of folks who see it as unresurrectably dead, then pick up the Mach-II code…

One of the things that I personally have been looking more and more at lately is leveraging existing Java code in ColdFusion. This started with my interest in utilizing Hibernate with ColdFusion (more on that later this summer, I swear!), but then I started being reminded of the huge wealth of Java code that's out there, ripe for the taking, and oh-so-easy to use with ColdFusion.Based on the discussions I read and the projects I see Java integration is the single most underutilized capability of ColdFusion. Yes, as I've said before we have a serious need for more open source projects in ColdFusion (more from me on that later this summer too), but if you need some functionality in CF that isn't there natively and you don't have the time or desire to write it yourself, don't limit your searching to only CF code. There's a huge chance someone's tackled your problem in Java and don't be scared--you absolutely don't need to know Java to leve…